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Sharing the Faith in the 21st Century (by Chris Roberts)

Whatever kind of Baptist you are, there is one thing I already know about you: you live in challenging days for the gospel. Not that there have ever been easy days for the gospel, but there have been periods in which people held a basic level of respect or basic degree of receptivity to the things of God. These days are not among them. Not only has society’s perception of Christianity change, society as a whole has undergone massive revolutions, changing every aspect of how we live and interact with one another.

One consequence of these changing factors is that old ways of sharing the faith may not receive the response once seen. In my own church, many of my people struggle to understand why festivals and tent revivals do not receive the same response as when they were young.

So here is the question for discussion: in our 21st century society, what do you and your church do for outreach? What sort of events are hosted by your church to draw people in? What do you or your church do to get out into the community and share the gospel (not just inviting people to church, but actually sharing the good news with them)?

Also, for those of you thoroughly enmeshed in church life, what do you do to reach out and build relationships with lost people? Random encounters? Join a book club? Etc. Also, what do you do to reach your neighbors?

How are you a witness in the 21st century?

(Anyone who tries to turn this into an argument over theology will be forced to work the church nursery alone for the next two months.)

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We are a small rural church and evangelism can be difficult. We have no huge overwhelming plan in place. We have started hosting a series of movie nights, and that has not really had the response I was hoping.

I think in the context of 21st century evangelism we need to change our whole mindset of inviting people to church as the main hope of reaching them. The days of knocking on doors in the community and getting a warm receiption is pretty much over, even in laid back rural Arkansas.

I was in the midst of prayer a few weeks ago and reflecting on my time at a previous church in the bus ministry. This all hit me then and came across like this: We need to stop using our busses to bring the lost to church, and start using our buses to take the church to the lost.

Because of small numbers and limited resources, I have tried to empower and encourage our members to be involved in various outreaches. For me it is the local jail ministry (adult and juvenile facilities). Other members are involved in leading at a Celebrate Recovery program at a sister church, working as cast and crew at a local passion play called The Witness, and hosting our local teen challenge several times a year for various events.

We have seen the greatest response from these efforts to go out, and much less success from events to bring folks in. However, as we go out, reaching people with the Gospel and love of Jesus, we see lives impacted, and sometimes, we see those people coming into our fellowship.

I feel that for too long we have looked at the church as a fort that we need to hold as we wait on the cavalry to arrive. We need to look at it as a base of operations from which we send soldiers of Christ to battle, spreading the Gospel and winning souls to the Kingdom.

“The days of knocking on doors in the community and getting a warm receiption is pretty much over, even in laid back rural Arkansas.”

and

“We need to stop using our busses to bring the lost to church, and start using our buses to take the church to the lost.”

These have been difficult realities for my church. The church I pastor has lost hundreds of people over the last 20-30 years, but in its heyday it was seeing somewhere in the neighborhood of 600 people in Sunday morning worship. Many of those were brought to the church through the bus ministry or through door-to-door evangelism. Because these methods were so successful, they have remained the standard evangelistic practice of the church ever since, even as the church has declined.

Block parties, festivals, and movie nights have also been tried, but I think the great challenge of these is our ever more affluent society. Once upon a time, games, activities, and ice cream at church were a big deal because they broke the monotony of home life. These days, everyone has a tv and every other person, even in poor neighborhoods, has some sort of game console. As a result, these kinds of things are not likely to be a draw.

I think this forces us to do something along the lines of what you said: don’t think of evangelism as going out to bring people to church, think of it as going out to serve and share Christ. I’m still not sure of the best ways to do this, particularly when trying to organize the church for outreach. For now, in the absence of other options, we have continued to emphasize our door-to-door outreach. In the words of the old evangelist, it is better to do outreach this way than not to do outreach at all. But I’m holding out the hope that older, established, off-the-beaten-path, traditional churches can still effectively reach their communities even in this day. I just don’t know how!

We still use the Sunday School as the primary outreach arm of our local church. Yet, I must admit, I find it harder to enlist people to go through the training necessary to be effective SS workers than in the past.

At the same time, I am finding the false assumption that the growth in quantity in the local church is totally dependent on the pastor and staff is growing as a legitimate perception among church members.

Ed Stetzer’s Book Lost and Found pointed out that the younger unchurched are generally interested in Spiritual things, but not interested in church. They’re also interested in relationships with the **ahem** older generation. If that doesn’t point to us folks in the church simply being open about our faith, talking to people about Spiritual matters, asking if they’re interested in such things, bringing up the topic, etc, I don’t know what does. Sunday School is a good tool to have to invite people to, to simply study scriptures (as opposed to “come to church”), and SS is a good place to train people to do this, but there’s just nothing like one poor hungry guy telling another poor hungry guy where he found bread.

It’s not that I’m any kind of model at this. But just being “out of the closet” as a believer by (1) wearing “Jesus pins” and (2) asking servers if I can pray for them, has been a revelation beyond anything I would ever have guessed.

“.. there’s just nothing like one poor hungry guy telling another poor hungry guy where he found bread.”

Amen! Hurting, lost folks don’t really give a big whoop about your theology, but listen carefully to what the Lord has done for you. A man with a personal experience is never at the mercy of a man with an argument. Tell them the old, old story of unseen things above, of Jesus and His glory, of Jesus and His love. Pray, look for where God is working and join Him there.

We decided that we needed to be strategic about our outreach and be focused. Last year we targeted the largest trailer park in our community and moved our VBS there. The management was more than happy to let us use the common area. We had extensive setup and tear down, but we took the gospel to their neighborhood. It was a learning experience, Now, because of that relationship, 1) we have several kids who have regularly attended our church, 2) we put on a Easter egg hunt attended by 50-60 kids plus another 50-60 adults, 3) we are moving our VBS camp to that location again this year.

Since we are a small church, we have only been able to have the one VBS camp per year. Our hope is that we can multiply that every year until we have many camps going over the summer.

I’ve heard suggestions like this before: move the events off the church grounds, into the middle of communities of this sort. I like it. The question remains how to reach the community that’s around the church itself (one of our struggles of the last several years), but what you say provides a way of opening doors to areas otherwise hard to reach.

Our location does not lend itself to events in our building. We are on a major highway with no homes around it. We have gone the route of bouncy houses, concerts, movie nights ,etc., but our location really limits the impact of such events. You want people to walk up, not drive up.

Another thing that we used to do (and are planning to bring back) is what we call Second Saturdays. We get a team (or teams) to work in the community helping out with elderly, food pantries, etc. We have formed good partnerships with the service ministries in our area.

Since we have an extremely de-centralized community (many subdivisions / trailer parks with no town center), our least effective outreach method is going door to door.

Our location is a peculiar problem. We have good facilities and a fair amount of room, including a nice, empty, grassy field, and we’re surrounded by houses, but we’re in a declining community a ways off the beaten path. To get to us, a person must be looking for us and will pass several churches along the way. It is a true community church, only the community has changed. Lots of empty homes, lots of seniors, a fair amount of transient housing, lots of broken homes, etc. All the churches in my area (SBC and other) are declining. Of the three churches clustered in a 2 block radius, we are doing the best, and we’ve had a rough time of it. I could continue on and on, but the gist of it is – like far too many churches in America, we’re struggling to make a difference in our community.

My dad has the gift of evangelism. That is on his mind all the time. Every church he has been in he always gets with the outreach guy and sparks a fire. They get organized and go out and witness. My dad is 86 years old. We go out to eat and he finds someone to ask the question, “Do you go to church anywhere?” Then follows up with, “If you die tonight are you 100% sure of heaven?” He does this every day and every where he goes. That is all he talks about. He only likes evangelistic messages with a clear presentation of the gospel. If a church has a man or woman like my dad they would do well to fuel the fire.

If I were a pastor and wanted to evangelize the area I lived in I would do the following:

4. I would feed my sheep and challenge their faith. You know, when something is going on within the body of Christ it tends to get out to the public. Remember when Jesus would heal someone and He told them not to tell anyone what had happened? Did they keep the greatest thing that ever happened to them quite? No. I am not talking about a healing service. I am talking about the church living the abundant life and trying to keep it quite. Usually, people catch what the pastor has if it is infectious. It is only infectious if it is the Holy Spirit.

3. There has to be people near by that are hurting in some form or another. A county run emergency room is usually full of people waiting that need comfort or assistance. An overgrown lawn is a sign that someone has a need. Old folks homes are full of people who are lonely and closer to eternity than anyone else. Suggestion: Serve before witnessing.

2. I would go to the church rolls. I can think of 3 SBC churches that have a thousand people on the church rolls and less than 25% of them attend church services regularly. I would want to make sure the absentees were saved. Also, there could be unresolved sin that is affecting the church and it needs to be resolved.

1. Pray and pray and pray. Until our lives display total dependency on God in every area of the church our other ideas end up to become just fruitless works. Success should never rest upon numbers, success should be measured by a church being codependent (in the right way) upon God alone in every endeavor.

How often does God bring someone into your church and is there for service and no one notices that person. Sure you may hand them a bulletin and say hello. You may even have a pause so folks shake hands and pass along pleasantries but no one really notices whom God brought through the door.

I have done some traveling in my day and have stopped in and heard some great sermons, worshiped God along side you, and have felt Gods presence in your church. I think you know where I am going with this. Evangelism starts at home, and if you let the ones God brought you go and your leaders and those who served that day can’t tell you that strangers full story and each one did not attempt to spend some time with that person. Well you can do all the community outreach you want but you may not have members equipped in hooking the fish that are sitting in your frying pan. Just a thought.

This is what I try to tell my people – in the midst of discouragement of seeing a church decline to this point (many of them were present in its heyday), we cannot and must not stop being faithful to what God has called us to do. Ministry and evangelism do not stop when the world changes around us, they don’t even stop when our resources dwindle and the task becomes harder.

After just completing a week long outreach effort in our community I have realized something very important. We spend a week doing service projects, going door to door, going to nursing homes, and conducting VBS in trailer parks. When I contrasted the lack of response with the responsiveness I see in east Africa I realized this thought. God may be using us in 2 different ways: EITHER to sow seeds of potential revival OR to declare the last call of mercy before final judgment. Either way we are successful as we are faithful. Great post, thanks.

Does your church want new members? -- 21 Comments
William Thornton I agree with you on the list. Several of them are big church things. An average church probably....
Karen I agree wholeheartedly with this post. The point is, don’t put all the responsibility on visitors and/or....
John Fariss I was traveling with my son on a Sunday some 30 years ago (maybe going to a funeral back home–I....